I have been reporting on food and agriculture for more than ten years, airing on NPR, The World, Latino USA, Living on Earth. I studied the food system in depth as a fellow and co-lecturer in the Africa Reporting Project at UC Berkeley’s School of Journalism and completed several documentary projects including a year cooking with immigrant women in their homes and telling their stories. I recently joined the faculty of the Media Studies Department at the University of San Francisco. Contact me at @BethFoodAg or check out my website at bethaudio.com

How Can We End Child Labor In The Fields? Pay Farmers Better

A few weeks ago a request for internal documents from the chocolate giant Hershey’s Co moved forward, with a judge ruling that the company will have to share confidential information with its shareholders. The Louisiana Municipal Police Employees’ Retirement System brought legal action against the company in 2012, asserting that the company knowingly bought cocoa from areas plagued with child labor issues.

Even though Hershey’s is the company targeted in the lawsuit, human rights abuses like child labor are still rampant throughout the food supply chain. Although companies like Mars or Nestlé now publicly discuss child labor in their supply chains, these issues are unlikely to go away when these same companies rely upon cheap land and labor to operate.

But what was not discussed by speakers as a solution to child labor was to substantially raise the price farmers and workers are paid for their work.

Reflecting on the conference, speaker Professor Alfred Babo, an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Bouaké, commented. ”I think if you ask most farmers if they need a new school, they would tell you that they would rather be paid better. If they had the money in their own pockets, they could send their children to school, and they would not need their children to work on the farms.”

Babo knows the topic well; he has worked for years with farmers in his home country of Côte d’Ivoire, a country with some of the most rampant child labor issues. Jane Nyambura, the Ethical Tea Partnership’s Programme Coordinator for Africa and a former tea farmer, also commented after the conference that it often does not matter what consumers pay for tea or the going price is on the world market – farmers see little of it.

CNN’s Freedom Project also makes this point clear. In their recently produced series of reports and videos on cocoa, they discuss child labor as a “symptom of a much deeper malady – poverty.” [The CNN webpage also implies all child labor "slavery" - but most child labor is not forced.]

“Your average cocoa farmer is earning about 10 percent of the absolute poverty line,” explains Antonie Fountain of the VOICE Network in the CNN video Cocoa-nomics. “In simple English, this means if you would increase a farmer’s income 10 fold, he would still be in the definition of the global society, absolutely poor.”

Prices for cocoa stand at less than half of what they were in 1980, adds Fountain. And while in the 1970s 50 percent of the cost of a chocolate bar went to pay for cocoa, today that is less than 6 percent.

This means that farmers in cocoa, and in those working in other commodities like sugarcane, have been paid less and less over time while stock prices for companies have continued to climb over the past 30 years.

Stock History for Hershey’s Co, 1985-2013. Accessed from investing.com.

It is time to get to the root of human rights issues in our food supply chain and to discuss how farmers and farm workers can be paid a fair, living wage for the raw materials they produce. There is no way to eradicate child labor in the fields or to bring famers back to farming if there is no money to be made farming.

Perhaps CEOs and shareholders alike will take note of the Hershey’s case and realize the power they have to change companies from the inside out.

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